LETTER-WRITER was Edward Marsh, scholar, wit, man-about-town, patron of up-coming artists and poets, and at the time private secretary to Winston Churchill. The letter was to Rupert Brooke, then (1913) travelling in America and the Pacific:
The father is a remarkable old man still in his early middle age at about 70 – very clever but – I beg his pardon, I mean ‘and’ – a tremendous talker, and frightfully pleased with himself, his paternity, his bicycling, his opinions, his knowledge, his ignorance – due to the limitations of his fatherhood of nine – his radicalism and everything that is his. … Gilbert is an artist too but only six months since. Stan had only about two things to show, he does work slowly.
Until the 1910 and 1912 London exhibitions of post-impressionist paintings, picture collecting had been largely confined to the purchase of traditional Victorian themes or the resale of Old Masters. But now a fashionable interest was developing among progressive connoisseurs in acquiring the work of young British painters, an interest encouraged by the more enlightened London galleries, by the formation of new groups of artists such as the London Group or the New English Art Club, and by the coming together in loose assemblies of intellectuals and aesthetes. Such an assembly was the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, one venue for which was the Bedford Square home of the startling Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Contemporary Arts Society, formed by Lady Ottoline and Roger Fry in 1910 to acquire the work of up-and-coming artists for national collections, was a product of the new outlook.
Not all the collectors were wealthy enough to indulge their enthusiasm at will. Some, like the ‘prodigal collector’ Michael Sadler, who had been Steward of Christ Church, Oxford, in the days when the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – had been a tiresome Curator of the Common Room, and who was now Chancellor of Leeds University, had to restrict their collecting to the use of such cash as they could raise extra to their emoluments. Edward Marsh was one of these. Although not at all wealthy, he was the recipient in addition to his salary of a fossil pension which had unexpectedly descended to him from a ‘mad aunt’ and which was paid periodically on account of a distant forebear, the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1812. This surprising bounty was used by Marsh to buy paintings, originally the conventional old masters, but now from ‘all those bloody artists’ as Rupert Brooke described them.*
Stanley was encouraged to display Apple Gatherers at the Contemporary Arts Society’s summer exhibition of 1913 at the Goupil Galleries – the galleries in which the young Vincent van Gogh had once worked as an assistant. The significance of the painting was quickly spotted. Among the visitors was the painter Henry Lamb, then twenty-eight or so, who wrote to congratulate Stanley. The Gauguinesque influence in the painting appealed to Lamb, whose own work, particularly of Breton fisher-folk, was perhaps similar in style. He was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group at the time that Clive Bell was acting as buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society. Lamb and others confidently expected that Bell would agree to the purchase of Stanley’s painting for £100, wealth to the young artist. But Bell, obsessed with his art theories, vetoed the purchase.* There was consternation at the decision, and Lamb was so incensed on Stanley’s behalf that although by then painting in the west of Ireland he wrote to offer £30. Sydney recounts in his diary the family delight: ‘Stan corroborated the happy news that Florence brought me last night. He has had an offer of £30 for his picture the Apple Gatherers from a Mr Lamb. I am so glad about this.’4
Stanley had not yet met Lamb and knew little of him or the intrigues about the painting. So he not unnaturally assumed that Lamb had offered the £30 because he admired the painting; which he did, but this was not the reason for the offer. Lamb felt that an injustice had been done to a young and worthwhile painter. Although he could ill afford the £30, he ventured on the purchase because he was convinced he could resell the painting at a higher price and thereby blaze abroad the obtuseness of a self-appointed arbiter of taste. In much the same way he had taken up public cudgels the previous year in a battle with French officialdom to support young Jacob Epstein’s controversial tomb in Paris of Oscar Wilde.
Stanley delivered the canvas on 3 November to Lamb’s London studio at the Vale of Health Hotel, characteristically insisting on precise details of how to get there.5 The Vale of Health had been developed in a restful hollow of Hampstead Heath – Leigh Hunt had once lived there and the young Keats wrote poetry there – and the subsequent hotel included artists’ studios arranged in pairs each side of a central staircase. Lamb’s was on the third floor. Outside, lawn terraces overlooked the Heath and a small lake, a scene which forms the view through the window in Lamb’s celebrated portrait of Lytton Strachey.6 However, it was not long before Londoners discovered the hotel’s position on the edge of ‘Appy ‘Ampstead ‘Eath and turned it into a holiday pub with a funfair adjacent and drunken fighting at closing time.
None of this troubled the steely and imperturbable Lamb, who reported to friends his first meeting with Stanley with a mixture of amusement and astonishment. As Lamb took Stanley that afternoon round the galleries of London, he who had spent years in France worshipping in the studios of painters he admired, suddenly found himself elevated to the status of a respected guru. They called at the imposing Chelsea home of Darsie Japp, who had overlapped with Stanley at the Slade in 1908 – 9 and who had already bought his Two Girls and a Beehive.7 Stanley was awed by Japp’s background, prosperity and savoir-faire. To him Japp, like Lamb, ‘knew everything’.
A bemused Lamb sent Apple Gatherers to Michael Sadler in Leeds, suggesting £60 and assuring Stanley that he would give him the extra. Stanley, who had accepted with equanimity the rejection of the painting, was surprised and gratified, and told the Raverats: ‘Lamb has sent the preliminary payment of £30. If he has to sell it – and he thinks he will – any profit he makes by so doing he will give me. He is very good. He said: “What can you expect from these fashion-mongers?” But I do not altogether blame the Society.’8
Worried that it was lack of ready cash which was preventing Lamb from being able to retain a painting he admired, Stanley courteously told Lamb in his quaint ‘business-letter’ style:
I feel crossed [pulled in two directions] about that picture because all the time I am wanting money I am wanting you to keep the picture. You understand I can wait. You see, for another year or so I shall not be having to spend a lot – I seldom do – and if I live as I have been doing until now I shall be able to get through without danger. I tell you that I do not worry about money but I [have to] think about it.9
Sadler was prepared to offer only fifty guineas, a sum he had recently received for some extra-mural work. But in the meantime Edward Marsh had come forward as a bidder. At the instigation of Mark Gertler he had been keen to acquire a Stanley Spencer work. Apple Gatherers was in his sights when Stanley and Gertler fell out over their opinions of Cézanne. Marsh felt he could not offend Gertler, whose work he equally admired, and had tactfully to wait until the tiff exhausted itself. He then invited Stanley to spend a weekend at his apartment in Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Stanley was impressed: ‘I spent a weekend with Eddie Marsh. I had Darsie Japp and Gaudier [Brzeska] for dinner one day and Gertler and a man named Nash* the next. … Marsh took me to tea at a Miss Nesbitt’s; the elder of the two Miss Nesbitts is very nice. She is an actress and she seems to be so unlike what I imagined an actress to be.’10 Cathleen Nesbitt was then on the threshold of her long and distinguished stage career. She was deeply in love with Rupert Brooke.
It must have been on that occasion that Marsh ventured to Stanley his wish to purchase Apple Gatherers. Like Sadler, he could not offer more than fifty guineas and Stanley would have to wait for payment until the next allocation of the Perceval pension. Stanley reported the offer to Lamb. He let Stanley decide. Stanley chose Marsh.†
The deal was completed in December. Marsh hung the painting in the small guest bedroom of his flat. It joined his embryo collection of contemporary artists – Augustus John, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler – among his considerable collection of quiet eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works.